Bob Miller's Calc for the Clueless: Calc III

Rating:
Summary: Multivariable simplicity
Review: After the stress of Taylor and Sequential Calculus in Calculus II, I assumed that the Calculus of several variables would be trivial. In essence, it was. However, the prohibition of calculator usage, coupled with the oddities of 3-D drawing made Calculus III a little more difficult. However, Bob Miller came to the rescue! With his relaxed prose style and user-friendly interface, Stokes, Gauss, and the like became quite simple. I was also concurrently in a Matrix Theory course, and his review of the idea of the R^n field and Abelian rules helped clarify other issues. All he needs now is to write a Linear Algebra book!

Rating:
Summary: Useless, mostly
Review: Got this book to help me study for my Math103 (calc 3 in duke notation) final, and it really serves no purpose. In the author's attempts to make calculus "easy" he ignores many many things that are important if one is to do well in calc 3 (or at least calc 3 as it is taught here). I've just started going through the book, and have only covered vectors and quadric surfaces, but the book has already completely skipped on covering the "universal" formula for distance between 2 things, as well as not covering curvature, the components of acceleration... I can only imagine how much more the author skips later on. I realize that the author could not satisfy the requirements for every calc3 class at every college, but come on: this is stuff that comes straight from what is probably the most used calculus text, Edwards + Penney. If you have a decent textbook for your calc3 class, you're better of just taking the time to study from it : you'll end up in much better shape.

Rating:
Summary: My preview of next semester calc3
Review: very easy to understand - very informative discriptions -